There seems to be a continuum of empathy along two dimensions: cognitive empathy and affective-emotional empathy.

Cognitive empathy is about being able to take someone's perspective:1. Believing that they are another person like you (rather than an animal)2. Understanding that they can have different mental states from you3. Knowing that as an individual they have choices as you do4. Accepting that they can be right even if they disagree with you5. Recognizing that they are complex whole people who have evolved due to thousands of variables and have all the myriad and sometimes incongruous facets that you do

Affective-emotional empathy is about being able to stand in someone else's shoes and feel for them:1. Understanding what they are feeling in a situation2. Anticipatinghow they might feel in a variety of situations3. Responding to how they feel in a way that exhibits this understanding4. Feeling what they are feeling in a mirroring fashion5. Caring about how they feel to the point where your own feelings and interests are set aside

This extreme end of empathy is love. We have capacities for empathy but we don't always apply empathy in the same way across all the people we know. We have more empathy for people who are like us, according to our own definition, than people who are not like us. We have more empathy for people we know than people we don't know. We have more empathy for people we're related to than to strangers. We're even typically more empathetic to family members that are closer to us in bloodline than family members that we share less DNA with.

So, how you develop empathy?

A short and completely non-comprehensive list of how to get better at this:

1. Failure - sheltered children often never have the opportunity to fail, and therefore are less able to understand how much of the human experience has to do with luck

2. Low social status and diminished power - people who are powerful tend to be less empathetic to those who are weaker. In psychology, this is called the 'paradox of power', which is that often people achieve status through empathy but then they become corrupted from that power.

3. Poverty - this is similar but more about the need to lean on others, and share resources and risk. Whether it's babysitting or borrowing money or sharing rides, people who are poor need friends more and are more likely to be empathetic.

4. Diversity of social relationships - diversity of perspectives among the people you are close to naturally broaden the circles of people you are empathetic towards. If you have a close black friend, you are more likely to be empathetic about the social dynamics that black people in the United States have to confront daily.

5. Living extensively in other cultures - living in a place as a resident, rather than being a tourist, gives you an immersive ethnographic experience of what it is like to live a different sort of life.

6. Compelling stories of people - great books and great movies can call from us an emotional imagination that mirrors how it would be to live those lives ourselves. That's why we cry in movies, why we find the best stories so engaging that we lose ourselves in them.

7. Recognition of death - death is one thing we all have in common. Everyone dies and it's a frightening thing. Recognizing this shared bond brings us all together.

8. Receiving honest feedback - this is why people who have siblings are often more stable human beings. Not only do they have the confidence of a broader love-based support system, they often have also had the benefit of having the emotional shit kicked out of them when they're younger. No one will ever be as mean to me as my siblings were when we were younger - and no one will ever be as honest to me as my siblings are now - but I'm a more resilient and better person for it.

9. Being loved - the unselfishness of love and the safe environment it creates, though perhaps initially strange to people who a low level of empathy, can call forth a natural reciprocity and positive biochemicals that expands the capacity for empathy. People can learn to love. That's how parents teach their children what love looks like.

10. Falling in love - there's a biochemical reaction that happens when you fall in love, experience limerence, that with the right situation, can create a virtuous cycle that ends with the individual being a better, more empathetic human being. Also, being in love is often extremely painful, which can engender learning, growth and eventually empathy.

11. Taking ecstasy - while this is controversial, MDMA has been shown to have a positive therapeutic effect in people with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. It is a drug with a dramatic emotional effect, increasing feelings of connectedness, trust and caring, and like the experience of falling in love, may jump-start a virtuous cycle that can expand a person's capacity for empathy.

12. Having children - I've heard men express anxiety about having daughters, because they're afraid men will do to their daughters what they did to other men's daughters. Having children changes your perspective, some of which is biological and some of which is the experience of loving another person so completely that their needs are more important than your own.

13. Getting older - aging seems to mellow people out. Probably because you get more experiences as you age, built relationships with more and different people, experienced pain and failure and low social status, worried about resources at times, been loved and fallen in love, perhaps have had children and taken drugs, experienced many great stories both real and fictional, and have come closer to your own mortality.

I began thinking about this question with another question: Does evil exist?

Because harm isn't evil if it's accidental, death isn't evil in its nature, pain isn't evil if it's useful. Evil is a human phenomenon, something that one being with choice does to other beings that feel. It is about intent.

Whether something is evil depends on 3 dimensions:1. Whether it was a free choice2. Whether the expected outcome was harm to others who can feel3. Whether the motivation was selfish

When you think about these 3 dimensions, it becomes clear that there is a range of evil.

1. Whether it was a free choice: Even the best of us are an amalgamation formed by biochemicals, diet, environment, social dynamics, past experience, emotions, physical selves, and choices.

Psychopath: "I couldn't help who I am. There was some demon in me from when I was very young"

Employee: "My boss told me to do it and I trusted his judgment. Frankly, everyone was doing it... it was just the way things were around here and no one questioned it"

Parent: "I was drunk and high and angry...please believe me, I didn't mean to hurt him. I love my son"

2. Whether the expected outcome was harm to others who can feel: We have different-sized and evolving capacities for empathy, an innate disposition which is then developed through experience. It is also applied in different ways based on our "circles" - our selves, family, friends, colleagues, people like us, people unlike us, animals. We also aren't always able to fully anticipate and understand the consequences of our actions.

Psychopath: "I didn't see her as a person. She was just a thing, an animal, not even that"

Employee: "I didn't fully understand what would happen... I didn't realize that all these people would be impacted"

Parent: "I wasn't thinking... I wasn't in a position to think, I was so drunk and addled"

3. Whether the motivation was selfish: Most motivations are selfish. But selfishness by itself isn't evil. We should be able to understand selfishness, since we all have at least a bit of it in us.

Psychopath: "I was hedonistic.. and thought only of myself"

Employee: "I wasn't about to risk my job, my career, even my social circle and identity... life was good and I didn't want to rock the boat"

Parent: "I was too young to be a parent, and stupid. I didn't yet have it in me to love someone else as a whole person when I could barely love myself.. all I could think about was myself"

So the answer as to whether evil exists: Yes.

Small evil exists every day and in (almost?) every person. We commit these small evils when we close the elevator door in someone's face, push our way through a crowd, ignore or treat our loved ones badly, say hurtful things when our hackles are raised, gossip about our colleagues in a negative fashion.

Big evil is very rare. Sizable harm that is fully understood and chosen to be inflicted with open eyes on others who we recognize can feel (and who we feel for) doesn't happen that often.

Most of what we call evil is the result of one or more of the following:

Genetic lack of empathy

Slow development of empathy (e.g. due to homogenous experience, power inequality, constricting mental frameworks, etc)

Innate lack or slow development of self-discipline

Childhood abuse warping the biological pathways

Extreme biochemical sensitivity

Substance abuse

A well-wrought story that is sincerely believed by the perpetrator

True ignorance about the consequences

In a weird way, these make the "evil" less evil because evil is about intent. And it's a bit comforting that, while there's harm in the world, there isn't too much vast, nefarious evil out there. There's just a bunch of imperfect and sometimes broken human beings stumbling around, sometimes creating beauty and often just making fools of ourselves.

And to cap this off, it occurs to me that the one thing that we could do to make a dramatic and positive impact on the world is to develop empathy in our children.